SCANDEX: Service centric networking for challenged decentralised networks

Do-It-Yourself (DIY) networks are decentralised networks built by an (often) amateur community. As DIY networks do not rely on the need for backhaul Internet connectivity, these networks are mostly a mix of both offine and online networks. Although DIY networks have their own home- grown services, the current Internet-based cloud services are often useful, and access to some services could be beneficial to the community. Considering that most DIY networks have challenged Internet connectivity, migrating current ser- vice virtualisation instances could face great challenges. Ser- vice Centric Networking (SCN) has been recently proposed as a potential solution to managing services more efficiently using Information Centric Networking (ICN) principles. In this position paper, we present our arguments for the need for a resilient SCN architecture, propose a strawman SCN architecture that combines multiple transmission technolo- gies for providing resilient SCN in challenged DIY networks and, finally, identify key challenges that need to be explored further to realise the full potential of our architecture.The work has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 645124.This is the accepted manuscript of a paper published in the Proceedings of the 2015 Workshop on Do-it-yourself Networking (Sathiaseelan A, Wang L, Aucinas A, Tyson G, Crowcroft J, Proceedings of the 2015 Workshop on Do-it-yourself Networking: an Interdisciplinary Approach, 2015, 15-20, doi:10.1145/2753488.2753490). The final version is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2753488.275349

Pro-Diluvian: Understanding scoped-flooding for content discovery in information-centric networking

Scoped-flooding is a technique for content discovery in a broad networking context. This paper investigates the ef-fects of scoped-flooding on various topologies in information-centric networking. Using the proposed ring model, we show that flooding can be constrained within a very small neigh-bourhood to achieve most of the gains which come from areas where the growth rate is relatively low, i.e., the net-work edge. We also study two flooding strategies and com-pare their behaviours. Given that caching schemes favour more popular items in competition for cache space, popu-lar items are expected to be stored in diverse parts of the network compared to the less popular items. We propose to exploit the resulting divergence in availability along with the routers ’ topological properties to fine tune the flooding radius. Our results shed light on designing ecient con-tent discovery mechanism for future information-centric net-works

A Lightweight Service Placement Approach for Community Network Micro-Clouds

Community networks (CNs) have gained momentum in the last few years with the increasing number of spontaneously deployed WiFi hotspots and home networks. These networks, owned and managed by volunteers, offer various services to their members and to the public. While Internet access is the most popular service, the provision of services of local interest within the network is enabled by the emerging technology of CN micro-clouds. By putting services closer to users, micro-clouds pursue not only a better service performance, but also a low entry barrier for the deployment of mainstream Internet services within the CN. Unfortunately, the provisioning of these services is not so simple. Due to the large and irregular topology, high software and hardware diversity of CNs, a "careful" placement of micro-clouds services over the network is required to optimize service performance. This paper proposes to leverage state information about the network to inform service placement decisions, and to do so through a fast heuristic algorithm, which is critical to quickly react to changing conditions. To evaluate its performance, we compare our heuristic with one based on random placement in Guifi.net, the biggest CN worldwide. Our experimental results show that our heuristic consistently outperforms random placement by 2x in bandwidth gain. We quantify the benefits of our heuristic on a real live video-streaming service, and demonstrate that video chunk losses decrease significantly, attaining a 37% decrease in the packet loss rate. Further, using a popular Web 2.0 service, we demonstrate that the client response times decrease up to an order of magnitude when using our heuristic. Since these improvements translate in the QoE (Quality of Experience) perceived by the user, our results are relevant for contributing to higher QoE, a crucial parameter for using services from volunteer-based systems and adapting CN micro-clouds as an eco-system for service deployment

Exploring HTTP Header Manipulation in the Wild

Headers are a critical part of HTTP. It has been shown that they are increasingly subject to middlebox manipulation. Although this is well known, little is understood about the general regional and network trends that underpin these manipulations. In this paper, we collect data on thousands of networks to understand how they intercept HTTP headers in-the-wild. Our analysis reveals that 25% of measured ASes modify HTTP headers. Beyond this, we witness distinct trends amongst different regions and AS types; for example, we observe high numbers of cache headers in poorly connected regions. Finally, we perform an in-depth analysis of types of manipulations to characterise how they differ across continents

Alternative networks: toward global access to the Internet for all

It is often said that the Internet is ubiquitous in our daily lives, but this holds true only for those who can easily access it. In fact, billions of people are still digitally disconnected, as bringing connectivity to certain zones does not make a good business case. The only solution for these unsatisfied potential users is to directly undertake the building of the infrastructure required to obtaining access to the Internet, typically forming groups in order to share the corresponding cost. This article presents a global classification and a summary of the main characteristics of different Alternative Network deployments that have arisen in recent years with an aim to provide Internet services in places where mainstream network deployments do not exist or are not adequate solutions. The Global Access to the Internet for All Research Group of the Internet Research Task Force, where all authors actively participate, is interested in documenting these emerging deployments. As an outcome of this work, a classification has converged by consensus, where five criteria have been identified and, based on them, four different types of Alternative Networks have been identified and described with real-world examples. Such a classification is useful for a deeper understanding of the common characteristics behind existing and emerging Alternative Networks

Connecting the Edges: A Universal, Mobile-Centric, and Opportunistic Communications Architecture

The Internet has crossed new frontiers with access to it getting faster and cheaper. Considering that the architectural foundations of today's Internet were laid more than three decades ago, the Internet has done remarkably well until today coping with the growing demand. However, the future Internet architecture is expected to support not only the ever growing number of users and devices, but also a diverse set of new applications and services. Departing from the traditional host-centric access paradigm, where access to a desired content is mapped to its location, an information-centric model enables the association of access to a desired content with the content itself, irrespective of the location where it is being held. UMOBILE tailors the information-centric communication model to meet the requirements of opportunistic communications, integrating those connectivity approaches into a single architecture. By pushing services near the edge of the network, such an architecture can pervasively operate in any networking environment and allows for the development of innovative applications, providing access to data independent of the level of end-to-end connectivity availability

Understanding internet usage and network locality in a rural community wireless mesh network

© 2015 ACM. Community networks owned and operated by local communities have recently gained popularity as a low cost solution for Internet access. In this paper, we seek to understand the characteristics of Internet usage in community networks and provide useful insights on designing and improving community networks in rural areas. We report the results of a socio-technical study carried out during a three month measurement of a community wireless mesh network (CWMN) which has been operating for two years in a rural area of northern Thailand. An on-site social interview was also conducted to supplement our analysis. The results reveal several interesting findings: rural users do use online social networks, instant messaging applications and online games similarly to urban users; they install unnecessary applications on their mobile phones and are completely obvious to their side effects - the traffic from these applications accounts for a major share of the traffic leading to numerous network anomalies. Finally our analysis uncovers the characteristic of locality in community networks where users in close geographical proximity interact with each other.TakNet was achieved thanks to sponsorship from THNIC Foundation. Part of this work was also supported by EU H2020 UMobile Project (Grant agreement no: 645124)

On the potential of Google AMP to promote local content in developing regions

The Google Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project has gained lot of interest from content providers as a means to improve user experience. It introduces a number of innovations to streamline the downloading, parsing and rendering of pages. Google recently announced the hosting of more than 2B+ web pages, covering more than 900K domains. Due to the constrained nature of Internet connectivity in developing regions, AMP offers particularly exciting potential for improving web user experience in these countries. This paper provides a first look at Google\u2019s AMP performance in Africa. We start by outlining the current web infrastructure provisioning in Africa, using local news websites as a case study. Discovering a sparse and low performance environment, we then evaluate the benefits that AMP can introduce in terms of accessibility to local content in developing regions. This study reveals that in Africa, AMP is able to reduce page load time and page size by a factor of 3 and 8 respectively. However, AMP is not a neutral technology as the search engine favours content that is using Google AMP. This raises an important question of search neutrality